HOWZAT

His later plays reflected a desire to make more explicit political statements. All of his work is underpinned by a keen political sense; late in his life he allowed it to bubble up to the surface. The broad consensus that moved through British society from the end of the second world war to 1979 and the appearance of Margaret Thatcher was one that Pinter probably felt in step with. The consensus that emerged internationally from 1979 was one he felt acutely out of step with. He felt an urgent need to articulate his own feelings of dislocation, and he carried with him a large constituency of sympathisers. Yet it was more than just a matter of left and right with Pinter — it was always more about justice and freedoms and rights. The antique and very British sense of fair play that he extolled on his adored cricket fields had a natural ethic that he passionately wanted to see extended to every inch of the world.

To many this turned him into a parodic figure, the champagne socialist, the poet of coprophiliac brutality, the luvvy for Labour. He was certainly known for his volcanic temper, and nothing triggered it more often than American foreign policy. He holidayed once in Greece with hosts who had to ensure that wherever they went on their island, they would never be in view of the small flotilla of American warships that were manoeuvring in the area. If they ever slipped up, the rest of the day was given over to long blasts of Swiftian rhetoric.

It is extraordinary and profoundly ironic that, at the end of his life, his prophecies of naked American brutality were fully satisfied by the appearance of an administration out of his darkest nightmares. Yet his temper was not solely reserved for Bush or Blair, it flared up at any small act of impoliteness or casual cruelty. He exemplified in his life and his plays a deep disgust at bullying of any sort. It is hardly surprising, given the frequency with which he had to stand up to East End Jew-bashing gangs in the Hackney of his boyhood.

In his later work he returned to the shorter and more contained forms that he worked through in his youth. Again, there was the same careful husbandry of resources, the same knowledge of exactly how much puff he had in his lungs.

Many writers trip themselves up by carrying on trying to write the same shape and scope of play as they managed when younger. Not Pinter. His late plays — One for the Road, Moonlight, Ashes to Ashes, Mountain Language — are all precisely constructed to match his energies. He is rather like an old boxer who knows he can last only one round so comes out with a brilliantly constructed fight plan — some feinting, a succession of vicious jabs and then two swinging hooks. Since he did not have the imaginative energy to gather all his muck into a single sweeping narrative, he concentrated on short poetic fragments that trailed after elusive meanings.

Pinter’s final and greatest achievement is one managed by only a select few. It is the ability to shape the air around them. A rank of great artists manage through the acuity of their perception and their modesty before the world, in Shakespeare’s phrase, “to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature . . . and \ the very age and body of the time his form and pressure”. That in itself is a noble calling. But a select few go further and manage actually to change the nature of that reality.

Shakespeare not only observed the exuberance and the conflict all around him, he forged from within that world a new idea of what the human could be, which flowered after him. Aeschylus redesigned ideas of civility and social justice and showed how they could live beside the darkness of the human spirit. Chekhov created a whole sensibility, which the world then tried to live out.

Each of these writers saw the moment they were in but also felt the tectonic plates of history shifting underneath them and in which direction the world was heading. They named that direction, brought it to life and, by doing so, made it happen. Pinter belongs in that company.

The foundation of this ability is a good ear, not only for speech, although Pinter had a celebrated relish for the bizarre and sublime banalities of the demotic, but an ear for the world. He listened to what was happening on the margins of society, on the edges, where the modern is always being incubated.

The world’s largest clothing manufacturers send scouts into the most down-at-heel urban ghettos to find out just what sort of new inventiveness is being born out of the poverty. They know that is where the new ideas will come from. Some poor kid’s witty rearrangement of a battered pair of old trainers is soon afterwards retailing at $500 a pop and is seen on some rock star’s feet.

In a similar way, although with less cynicism, the best dramatists go to society’s darkest places and listen to how language and individuals and communities are being re-imagined there. By making that new life manifest on the stage, they invite others to understand and to imitate it, and it soon becomes part of the fabric of the world we live in. What Pinter heard, from West London tramps, from East End families, from lost souls everywhere, was the way the world was heading. He communicated that onto the stage, and spread its influence far wider.

Pinteresque is not just the description of a world that was given; it is also the world he helped to create.

Dominic Dromgoole is artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe in London

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